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Workshops

About the Session:

Workshops

Highlights from workshops held throughout the event, including:

Fortification and Bio-Fortification – Hosted by Lynn Brown (HarvestPlus), Frances Knight (WFP), and Regina Moench-Pfanner (ibn360), featuring a series of guests from DSM

Fundraising and Advocacy – Hosted by Heidi Kessler (GCNF)  and Clarissa Mackay (Eat Right, Be Bright)

School Health and Hygiene – Hosted by Seung Lee (Save the Children) and Anne Sellers (Catholic Relief Services)

Highlights from Sessions

Fortification and Bio-Fortification

Highlights:

  • Frances Knight – Nutritious diets are to key combatting and protecting against malnutrition. However, across the globe, nutritious meals on average cost five times more than a diet that meet only energy needs and would be unaffordable for more than 3 billion people.
  • Frances Knight – Senegal increased coverage of school feeding program to two additional regions and approximately 300 additional schools and 60k more students in response to COVID19 because they were seeing the social and economic impact the pandemic was having and school meal programs were seen as an effective way to combat the hunger issues.
  • Lynn Brown – Biofortification is a process of increasing the density of vitamins and minerals in a crop through conventional plant breading or agronomic practices, so that the biofortified crops, when consumed regularly will generate measurable improvement in vitamin and mineral nutritional status
  • Lynn Brown – Schoolchildren in Colombia liked biofortified beans in terms of color, smell, taste, and size, shedding light on biofortification’s potential to be scaled up as integrated into school-feeding programs.
  • Aakanksha Nayyar – “Malnutrition could exacerbate the effects of COVID-19 in mothers and children. access to nutritious, safe, and affordable diets needs to be safeguarded and promoted as a cornerstone of the response to COVID-19.”
  • Soraya Pinto Linares – COVID “The COVID 19 Pandemic deepens the malnutrition crises and the initial consequences of the pandemic gave rise to the destruction to the food supply chains due to lockdown and travel restrictions and this along with the global economic downturn and reduced family income was linked to reduction in food calories and micronutrient access”

Presented by:

Moderated By: Regina Moench-Pfanner, PhD, MSc, Founder and CEO ibn360

Frances Knight, Senior Nutrition Systems Advisor, World Food Programme

Lynn Brown, Director, Alliances and Policy, HarvestPlus

Monique Smorenburg, Director, Nutrition Improvement EMEA, DSM (Africa focus)

Aakanksha Nayyar, Nutrition Improvement South Asia, DSM

Fundraising and Advocacy

Highlights:

  • In this 90-minute interactive workshop, participants explored advocacy as it relates to the promotion, sustainability, and expansion of school meals programs.  Participants explored a real-world advocacy success story and identified the key parts of a successful campaign.  Working with regional partners, participants had the opportunity to practice using data from the Global Survey Country Reports to inform the development of an advocacy plan. 

  •  New Zealand’s Eat Right, Be Bright has successfully advocated to the national government to create a school meal program for New Zealand’s school children.
  • “Advocacy is a process of supporting and enabling people to express views and concerns, access information and services, and defend and promote rights and responsibilities”

Presented by:

Heidi Kessler, Global Child Nutrition Foundation

Clarissa Mackay, Eat Right, Be Bright

School Health & Hygiene

Highlights:

  • Studies have shown, primary school age children make up a very small percentage of COVID-19 deaths and infections; however, the data is still unclear on if children can be carries of the disease. It is vital schools’ function with proper hygiene and sanitation practices until the scientific community has more answers on how COVID spreads and who are the carriers.
  • The health and hygiene practices that have been heavily emphasized in response to COVID-19 need to continue beyond the pandemic because good washing of hands and sanitary school spaces helps protect against other diseases schools experience.
  • Children should be seen as the agent of change. We are hoping they take the health and hygiene lessons home to their family, To hopefully improve the whole community.
  • Protection and Well-Being – when discussing health and hygiene, we do need to factor in mental health. For children to manage the social isolation the COVID-19 Pandemic is causing, we need to encourage imagination in schoolchildren and in helping them develop to coping mechanisms as they miss being with their friends and seeing their teachers.

Presented by:

Seung Lee, School Health & Nutrition Director, Save the Children

Anne Sellers, Education Advisor, Catholic Relief Services

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